Run against Obamacare—that’s the only lesson Republicans will draw from their bitter losses in VA
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That was at 7 p.m. An hour later, Republicans at the downtown Marriott were whooping as the early exit polls, with GOP gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli down by 7, were replaced by exit polls showing him down only 2. For two more hours, they milled around and congratulated each other and remarked on how close they’d made this thing—hey, they even won those House of Delegates races the media told them they’d lose!
Asking the 2013 elections to be a referendum on something big was always a stretch. There were statewide elections in New Jersey and Virginia; there were races for mayor in New York and Houston and Detroit and Seattle; there was a special Republican primary for the House seat in Mobile, Ala. This Election Day was less a map of America, more a map of one of those scammy cellphone coverage plans that Verizon tells you not to buy.
But it did not humiliate conservatives. In New Jersey, Gov. Chris Christie was re-elected by 22 points—just what the polling predicted—with no coattails. Oh, sure, he became the first Republican candidate since 1998 or so to win the Hispanic vote, but he cut ads and stumped for four state senate candidates, all of whom were losing at the end of the night. In Alabama it was Dean Young, a social conservative who remade himself as a Tea Partier, who lost to an experienced, Chamber of Commerce–backed candidate named Bradley Byrne. Conservatives were largely fine with this, as Young was a know-nothing who couldn’t even name the House minority leader when pop-quizzed. “Thank goodness,” emailed conservative columnist Quin Hillyer (who’d run in the first round of this primary) after the vote.
Ah, but in Virginia—in Virginia, conservatives went the distance. They’d been written off since the end of summer (by reporters like, well, me) and they’d been outspent by $15 million. They still held on to most of their vote, even with Libertarian candidate Robert Sarvis surprising everyone and pulling 7 percent. This, they said again and again, proved that Cuccinelli’s closing argument was right. He kept saying the election was “a referendum on Obamacare,” and then he almost won.
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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2013/11/ken_cuccinelli_loses_to_terry_mcauliffe_republicans_believe_obamacare_almost.html
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